The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

December 31, 2008

Nathan Eugene Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. in a family was of racially mixed blood. His grandfather on his mother’s side was Louisiana politician P. B. S. Pinchback, who grounded his Reconstruction career on an insistence that he was black. In any event, the young Toomer, growing up in an affluent suburb of Washington, was fair skinned, and identified with what he described as a “fusion” of the racial intermingling. Toomer’s father left his mother in 1895, and in 1905 he and his mother moved to New Rochelle and Brooklyn, New York, settling with her white second husband. Upon her death in 1909, Toomer returned to his maternal grandparents, who now lived in a black neighborhood of the city. He attended a black high school.

In 1914 he began at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, determining to major in agriculture. But psychologically, he was not fit for the university, and left after one year, eventually enrolling in other universities but never obtaining a degree. In 1919, at City College of New York, he settled upon being a writer, changing his first name to Jean. His major influences during those years were the bohemian figures of Greenwich Village, particularly the novelist and critic Waldo Frank.

Over the next two years he divided his time between Washington and New York, reading a wide range of literature and writing stories, poems, review, essays and other work. This would be a time of heady experimentation, and most of his works from this period have been characterized by at least one of his anthologizers as “The Aesthetic Period” of his career. He experimented with poems that imitated Imagist work, sound poems, and, in at least one instance—in “Banking Coal”—explored imagery and a voice that came close to that of Robert Frost.

In mid-1921 Toomer accepted an offer to become principal of a black school in Sparta, Georgia. During that period Toomer came to understand his racial roots and came to recognize himself in the folk-songs and accents of rural black America. The result of this, was a new sensibility, expressed in his 1923 in his work Cane, almost a document of his lyrical experience in the South. Freely mixing poetic prose, narrative, and poems broken into lines, Cane reminds one, in some senses, of the experiment, Spring and All, published the same year by William Carlos Williams. But in the work’s free expression of African American forms such as spirituals and work songs, it became one of the most influential documents for the flowering of black writers and artists of the 1920s-1930s that would come to be described as the Harlem Renaissance.

After this period, however, Toomer did not continue with the expression of black culture, but came under the influence of the Russian founder of “Unitism,” Georgei Gurdjieff, who combined elements from philosophy, psychology, dance and eastern religious ideas. In 1924 Toomer began teaching Gurdjieff’s methods in New York and, later, in Chicago; his poetry also became infused with Gurdjieff’s ideas, continuing in that mode even after his break with the guru in 1934.

Toomer had married Margery Latimer in 1931, but after her death in childbirth, he remarried, settling into a domestic life on a farm in Pennsylvania. He continued writing until his death in 1967.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923); The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, ed. by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988)

December 30, 2008

Jayanta Mahapatra was born in Cuttack, India, and has spent most of his life in Orissa, where he lives. Raised among poor people, Mahapatra's life often portrays everyday events in contemporary India, and his work champions those who live in a world of hunger, greif, and injustice.

He attended Ravenshaw College and the Science College at Patna before coming a sub-editor at the Eastern Times. In later years he lectured on physics and other scientific subjects throughout India, and as his poetry became more known, was invited to be a visiting writer at the then-famed University of Iowa International Writer's Program. For his books of poetry─ which include A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Dispossessed Nests (1986), and Selected Poems (1987)─he has won several awards: the Bisuva Milana Award for Poetry and the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize among them. He has also written books of poetry and juvenile works, and translated.

December 27, 2008

Born in Milan in 1934, Giulia Nicolai’s mother was an American and her father an Italian, and, accordingly, she grew up learning to speak both languages. Later she learned German and French.

She began her professional career as a photographer, with works in various magazines such as Life, Paris Match, and Der Spiegel. In 1966 she published her first novel, Il grande angolo (1966) and in 1969 her first book of poetry. Associated with the neo-avanat-garde Gruppo 63, she founded, with poet Adriano Spatola, the avant-garde journal Tam Tam.

It does not propose truthit keeps the meaning openthe sense of things comes by speaking.

The measure of a pagea communication of formsthe hypothesis of a reality in motion:a vertigo of infinitediverse inversion.

And that which is opposedmay be always overturnedto its opposite.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti and the author

(from Subtitution, 1973)

The Subject Is the Language

An idea of vengeance: the retaliationor revenge of the word which has been thought(make the gesture of inventing languageperform the act by which you appropriate language).

Though dependent or superimposedthe individual and the word exist as separate objects:not a mutual agreement of words and thingsbut the pleasure of interfering.

Things exist to be saidand language narrates. It outrages in turna language already violated by othersto possess language is a way of being.

The subject is therefore the languagewith which to commit a capital offense.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti and the author

(from Subtitution, 1973)

The Lockheed Ballad

The electronic brain’s “subconscious” that hadfurnished Lockheed’s executives with code namesfor those words, verbs, initials etc. which theyunder no circumstances wanted to be discoveredwriting or uttering, had, as it should, a weaknessfor the great characters of tragic drama, particularlyShakespearian. In Lockheed’s little black book(supplement to Panorama, June 15, 1976) we canin fact discover: Othello, Desdemona, Caesar,Hamlet, Portia, and many others.For his part time, Shakespeare insteademployed Rumour* (meaning, in English, chatter,talk, spreading stories, not holding one’s tongue,gossip-mongering) who, in Henry IV,plays the role of the announcer (here we quotethe opening lines of the prologue to part II):

INDUCTION

Enter Rumour, painted full of tonguesRum. Open your ears; for which of you will stopThe vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

…(I think the reader might consult thefollowing as worth rereading in thislight). From a structural perspective, furtherexamining the coded terms in the little black book,we realize they may be subdivided into three otherbroad categories: names taken from Flora and Fauna(antelope, lilac, lion, iris etc.) names withheroic-epic connotations, (argonaut, cosmos,gladiator etc.) and words typically anglo-saxon,monsosyllabic and onomatopoeic which sometimescorrespond to the written sounds of American comicssuch as: sob (which in English means to cry, to makea weeping sound), jab (to knife), tap (to knock onthe door), etc.Given the richness of the material present inLockheed’s little black book, it’s clearWe might obtain an infinite number of poetic

*Rumor: the name of an Italian Prime Minister involved in the Lockheed scandal

Or theatrical texts (epic, tragic, comic, etc.)And that these texts, with a simultaneous translationOf the cryptic word into its actual meaning(or vice versa) offer innumerable possibilitiesor wordplay in two or more voices as in a sortof naval battle of words. But to classify andelaborate the terms in the little black bookin all their possible combinationsanother electronic brain is clearlyindispensable. The text I’ve chosen to writeis composed exclusively of words taken(in their coded meaning) from the little black bookit uses the names of Shakespearian charactershere present and may be read as a ballad oran epilogue to a hybrid of tragediesand comedies.

Othello’s feline ire fobs his graniteFingers; his vim hath sealed his willowGoddess’ lips. The flametree’s firethornDoth spear the lady’s reb; DesdemonaThe jonquil, the ladybird , the opal orioleNow cold and dab like flotsam uponThe tidal ebb. Woe to Hamlet, the moonbeamUpon his silver sword, the bleak phantom’s vox,The prophet’s raven cloak, the hemlockAnd the hammer hard. An ode to JulietTo Portia, to the actors in the barnyard.

—Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti

(from Foresta ultra Naturam, 1989)

from Frisbees

for Bob McB, messenger of the gods of Cazadero Valley

OnceOpening the refrigeratorI too happened to say“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

*

One doesn’t play Frisbee with words alone.It’s good to do it also with arms and legs.

*

“Beati I poveri di spirto”ought to come out in English:“Blessed are the half-wits.”Instead it’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”(Yet another reason for me to drink a lot.)

*

Presidents of the United States(even since television has been television)when they speak to the American people,always fix on a spot above the camera lens.(See: horizon. See: infinite).But do they have their feet on the ground?

*Careful that the FrisbeesMay become nauseating.The order in which they follow each other is important.Certainly there may be somethingStill elusive in all thisBe it for you and for me!I am becoming a socially committed poetess.Am I becoming a socially committed poetess?

*

To be able to establishthe morning after,serenely,in the light of daythat even my own presumptionand stupidityare bottomlessare limitless……is a most lovely thing.

The way I walkhas always made me wear downthe outside edge of theheels of my shoes.Playing FrisbeeI wish to begin wearing down a littlethe inside too.To even things out.I wish also the FrisbeesMight helpMake my mind workIn a new way.Do I ask too much?For this purposeit might helpto start calling themFrisbeezen or Zen-Frisbees.

*

So what’s this?A Frisbee of head or legs?

*

And why didn’t I writeA Frisbee of legs or head?

*

(The first stepsare always a little problematic.)What about a Porno-frisbee?Yeah, a dirty-minded one.

*

In any caseand here we’re on easy groundthe Frisbeezensound more Germanthan Zen-Frisbeeswhich in turnsound more Californiathan Japanese.(We’re still along way from satori.)

*

I wouldn’t want the FrisbeesTo be my last will.Certainly, they have somethingOf the exquisite corpse about them.

*

I called my father affectionately “Rhinoceros,”“old yellow rhinoceros.”Years after his deathI dreamt of a RhinocerosSniffing with his hornAt a poppy in a field.And he got furious,he got beastlyand pissed ofbecause with his horn (plugged up)he couldn’t smell the perfume.(I knew, in the dream,that poppies have no smellbut I didn’t dare go near the Rhinocerosto tell him.)The rhinoceros in the distancefussed and stampedThen in anger with contempt,he pissed on the poppy.He let go on to p of it a long mighty piss.poppypop peeCiao Sigmund!

*

Roman Polanski.And now we have a Roman Polanski Pope.It was Paul Vangelistiof Los Angeleswho made me understandthat Poles and Italians resemble each other.Petrus, where are you?I missed you at the Pasticceria.They make an excellent Paradise cake,Ça va sans dire.

*

The Goethe-Frisbee.There was on the window-sillA can of Oranjeboom beer.Black can I noticelooking out the windowwhen the pavement toois black with rain.I say: “How much alikeand how beautiful they are the black of the canand the black of the pavement.”Then I notice the little orange treeand registerthe Dutch House of Orange.But then(and here I’m not sure if it’s the faultof Marguerite Yourcenarwhom I’m readingand who in Les yeux ouvertsspeaks of Goethe),suddenly this demented linesprings to mind:“Kennst du das Land wo die Oranjeboom.”

*

I tell the cashier at the ScimmieI want to pay for two reds.“Wine?” he asks me.(He must be very politicized).Soon after at the baraI see Pavese’s doubleAnd Sanguineti’s double.Could these be thenThe cashier’s two reds?

*

And IHow many hours must I stay at the barhow many reds must I drinkbefore I seemy own double?

*

(How about that!Sex!What liberties it takes!What transformations!)

*

To explain to her woman friendsAmerican and EnglishHow little she knew Italian,My mother would always say:“I give tu to strangersand lei my husband.”

Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, Alexander Vvedensky grew with a mother who was a gynecologist and a father who was an economist. From 1917 to 1921 he attended high school, meeting Leonid Lipavsky and Iakov Drusky, who would become the major philosophers in his circle. From his teacher, L. V. Georg, the young boy learned of the latest developments in Russian poetry, including Futurism and other experimental poetries. He started at the university after high school, but soon dropped out.

His major poetic education took place at GNKhUK, the State Institute of Artistic Culture, headed by Kazimir Malevich, with researches into zaum (sound) poetry by Igor Terentiev, for whom Vvedensky worked. In 1925 he and his high school friend, Iakov Druskin, became friends with the aspiring poet Danill Kharms, who was a student of the Futurist sound poet Alexander Tufanov, himself experimenting with theories of zaum thorough narrative time. For the next year and a half, Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky and Kharms sought to establish an organization that would unite all avant-garde and left-wing artist of Leningrad. The first of their radical projects, the theater company Radix, “experimenting in the area of non-emotional and plotless art and aiming to create a pure theater not subject to literature,” fell apart while rehearsing the Kharms and Vvedensky montage My Momma’s Got Clocks All Over. They also made attempts to join forces with Malevich, but after political denunciations in the press forced the closure of GINKhUK, Malevich left for Warsaw. In late 1927, they were offered a base at the Leningrad Press Club on the condition that they assume a new name, since the word “left-wing” sounded to authorities to be to close to Trotsky’s views. Thus was born OBERIU, a neologism standing for the Union of Real Art.

The same year, children’s writer and editor Nikolai Oleinikov invited OBERIU members to write for the State Publishing House for Children (DETGIZ). Vvendensky would later confess that he was attracted to children’s literature because it was non-political, allowing him to experiment with nonsense. Neither he nor Kharms achieved greatness as writers for children, but it allowed them to work on their more serious writing.

OBERIU was unable to publish most of their writings, but the organization to provide raucous performances in Leningrad clubs and educational institutions. Transpiring under nonsensical slogans hung for the occasion, the performances united poetry, theater, film, magic tricks, juggling, and general clowning around; they culminated in debates that often turned into shouting matches. The State’s tightening control over the arts, threatened these performances, however, and audiences grew increasingly hostile to their work. After an April 30th reading at Leningrad State University, OBERIU was forced to dissolve because of newspaper accusations of counterrevolutionary activity. The press also voiced accusations against their children’s writing. Vvedensky and Kharms were detained in December of 1931 along with other members of OBERIU. Vvedensky, suffering hard imprisonment, cracked under interrogation, naming others and admitting his guilt. He was sentenced to three years of internal exile, forced to remain away from major population centers. By 1933, however, both his term and Kharms’s was reduced, and they returned to Leningrad, allowed to write children’s books but not to compose poetry. The avant-garde movement was over, and they wrote privately only for their friends.

In 1936, Vvedensky met the woman who would become his third wife, and he moved with her to Kharkov, where he spent much of the day gambling and writing frenetically at night. In 1937, his wife gave birth to a son. A month later, Nikolai Oleinikov was shot, charged with being a Trotsyite, and Nikolai Zabolotsky was seized on a terrorism charge. Soon after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Vvedensky himself was arrested and shipped via a prison train from Kharkov. He died of dystentery while being transported. Kharms, arrested a month earlier, died in a prison asylum in February 2nd the following year.

Most of Vvedensky’s work has been lost—both his poems and his novel, Murderers, You Morons. Of the pieces that survived, the majority were saved by Iakov Druskin, who was also responsible for saving much of Kharm’s writings. In 1980, Druskin’s student, Mikhail Meilakh, published Vvedensky’s collected writings in the United States in the Russian-language publishing house Ardis. Vvedensky’s work was published in his homeland during perestroika.

in Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary-Discovery. Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, edited and trans. by George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1974); An Invitation for Me to Think: Poems (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009).

Snow Lies

snow liesearth flieslights flipin pigments night has comeon a rug of stars it liesis it night or a demon?like an inane leversleeps the insane riverit is now awareof the moon everywhereanimals gnash their caninesin black gold cagesanimals bang their headsanimals are the ospreys of saintsthe world flies around the universein the vicinity of starsdashes deathless like a swallowseeks a home a nestthere’s no nest a holethe universe is alonemaybe rarely in flighttime will pass as poor as nightor a daughter in a bedwill grow sleeping and then deadthen a crowd of relationswill rush in and cry alasin steel houseswill howl loudlyshe’s gone and buriedhopped to paradise big-belliedGod God have pitygood God on the precipicebut God said Go playand she entered paradisethere spun any which waynumbers houses and seasthe inessential existsin vain, they perceivedthere God languished behind barswith no eyes no legs no armsso that maiden in tearssees all this in the heavenssees various eaglesappear out of nightand fly inaneand flash insanethis is so depressingthe dead maiden will sayserenely surprisedGod will saywhat’s depressing what’sdepressing, God, lifewhat are you talking aboutwhat O noon do you knowyou press pleasure and Paristo your breast like two pearsyou swell like musicyou’re swell like a statuethen the wood howledin final despairit spies through the taresa meandering ribbonlittle ribbon a cratecurvy Lena of fateMercury was in the airspinning like a topand the bearsunned his coatpeople also walked aroundbearing fish on a platterbearing on their handsten fingers on a ladderwhile all this went onthat maiden restedrose from the dead and forgotyawned and saidyou guys, I had a dreamwhat can it meandreams are worse than macaronithey make crows double overI was not at all dyingI was gaping and lyingundulating and cryingI was so terrifyinga fit of lethargywas had by me among the effigieslet’s enjoy ourselves reallylet’s gallop to the cinemaand sped off like an assto satisfy her innermostlights glint in the heavenis it night or a demon

January 1930

—Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky

The Meaning of the Sea

to make everything clearlive backwardstake walks in the woodstearing hairwhen you recognize firein a lamp a stovesay wherefore you yearnfire ruler of the candlewhat do you mean or notwhere’s the cabinet the potdemons spiral like fliesover a piece of cakethese spirits displayedlegs arms and hornsjuicy breasts warlamps contort in sleepbabes in silence blow the trumpetwomen cry on a pine-treethe universal God standsin the cemetery of the skiesthe ideal horse walksfinally the forest comeswe look on in fearwe think it’s fogthe forest growls and waves its armsit feels discomfort boredomit weakly whispers I’m a phantommaybe later I’ll befields stand near a hillockholding fear on a platterpeople montenegrins beastsjoyfully feastimpetuous the music playsfinns have funshepherds shepherdesses barkbarks are rowed across tableshere and there in the barksmark the minutes’ haloeswe are in the presence of funI said this right awayeither the birth of a canyonor the nuptials of cliffswe will witness this feastfrom this bench this trumpetas the tambourines clatterand flutters, spinning like the earthskies will come and a battleor we will come to be ourselvesgoblets moved among mustachesin the goblets flowers roseand our thoughts were soaringamong curled plantsour thoughts were soaringamong curled plantsour gods our auntsour souls our breathour goblets in them deathbut we said, and yetthis rain is meaninglesswe beg, pass the signthe sign plays on waterthe wise hills throwinto the stream all those who feastedglasses flourish in the waterwater homeland of the skiesafter thinking we like corpsesshowed to heaven our arsessea time sleep are onewe will mutter sinking downwe packed our instrumentssouls powders feetstationed our monumentslighted our potson the floor of the deepwe the host of drowned menin debate with the number fifteenwill shadow-box and burn upand yet years passedfog passed and nonsensesome of us sank on the floorlike the board of a shipanother languishesgnashes his wisdom teethanother on dull seaweedhung the laundry of his muscleand blinks like the moonwhen the wave swingsanother said my footis the same as the floorin sum all are discontentedleft the water in a huffthe waves hummed in backstarting to workships hopped aroundhorses galloped in the fieldsshots were evident and tearssleep and death in the cloudsall the drowned men came outscratched themselves before the sunsetand rode off on a carriage beamsome were rich some notI said I see right awaythe end will come anywaya big vase is brought this waywith a flower and a cymbalhere’s a vase that’s cleverhere’s a candle snowsalt and mousetrapfor fun and pleasurehello universal godhere I stand a bit sulliedglory be to heavens washed awaymy oar memory and will

1930

—Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky

An Invitation for Me To Think

Let us think on a clear daysitting down on stump and stone.Us around flowers grew,stars, people, homes.From the mountains tall and steep,water fell at breakneck speed.We were sitting at the moment,we kept our eyes on them.Us around the day shines bright,underneath us stump and stone.Us around the birds fluttered,the blue maidens puttered.But where oh where us all aroundis thunder’s now absent sound.We perceive the river partially,we’ll tell the stone contrarily:Night, where are you in your absenceat this hour, on this day?Art, what is it that you feel or sense,being there without us?Government, where do you stay?Foxes and bugs are in the woods,concepts in the sky above—Come closer God and ask the fox:so, fox, is it far from dawn to dusk?will the stream run a long distancefrom the word understood to the word flower?The fox will reply to God:it’s all a disappearing road.You or he or I, we’ve gone but a hair,we hadn’t even time to see that minute,and look God, fish and sky, that part has vanishedforever, it would seem, from our planet.We said: yes, it’s apparent,we can’t see the hour ago.We thought—we’revery lonely.In a moment oureye covers a little only.And our hearing, down and out,senses only one sound.And our soulknows but a sad snippet of science’s whole.We said: yes, it’s obvious,it’s all very upsetting to us.And that’s when we flew.And I flew like a cuckooimagining my lightness.A passerby thought: He’s coo-coo,he’s made in a screech-owl’s likeness.Passerby, forget your stupid gloom,look, all around putter maidens blue,like angels, dogs run smartly round,why is it all boring and dark for you.We’re tickled by what is unknown,the inexplicable’s our friend,we see the forest walking backward,yesterday stands all around today.The star changes in volume,the world grows old, the moose grows old.We once happened to bein the saltwater body of the seas,where the waves let out a squeak,we monitored the proud fish:the fish floated like oilon the surface of the water,we understood, life was burning out everywherefrom the fish to God and the star.And the feeling of calmcaressed everybody with its arm.But noticing music’s bodyyou did not burst into tears.The passerby addresses us:Hasn’t grief taken hold of you completely?Yes, music’s magic beaconburned out, evoking pity.The ruling night was just beginning,we cried a century.

Born the son of a church organist in 1904, Edvard Kocbek grew up in the section of present-day Slovenia that was then Austria-Hungary. He studied classics and foreign languages in high school, but by the time he had finished his studies Slovenia had lost much of its independence and had become part of the new country of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. He entered a Catholic seminary in Maribor with the intention of becoming a priest. After two years, however, he left in, protesting the rigid rules of the community.

In Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, Kocbek studied Romance languages and literature at the university and edited the Catholic magazine, Cross, while also contributing to the Catholic Socialist Fire. Writing poetry, he began find a space between the provincialism of much of Slovene literature at the time and the avant-gardism of poet Srečko Kosovel.

Two trips of western Europe to Berlin and France, where he discovered German expressionism and French surrealism, highly influenced his writing, and upon his return to Slovenia, he began writing a cycle of “Autumn Poems,” which, with other such poetic cycles, would make up his first published book, Zemlija (Earth, 1934).

By the mid-1930s, as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes changed its name to Yugoslavia and became a monarchist dictatorship, Kocbek began speaking out against the Slovene support of Franco, as he moved closer to socialism. By the beginning of World War II the poet called for a new political order: [The intellectual] must opt for a new order as soon as possible, without supporting any particular ideological group in its entirety.” Throughout the war Kocbek was active in anti-Fascist groups, and he had attained the rank of general, serving, briefly, as a minister in Belgrade by the end of the war. Returning to Slovenia he became Vice President of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Slovenia.

Throughout World War II, Kocbek had continued to write, but he was not eager to publish. The rise of Yugoslavian Communism, coinciding with the new wave of Stalinism in Russia, meant that there was a high level of censorship throughout this period; and it was only when Tito broke with the Comintern in 1948 that Kocbek ventured to publish excerpts from his war time diary, Comradeship. But his next book, the collection of stories Fear and Courage, resulted his public disgrace and his being outcast as an official. For the next ten years he became a nonperson, his watched, his phone tapped, and quarantined to his neighborhood. He earned a living only through translation. Only in 1963 was he allowed to publish a new collection of poetry, Groza (Dread). In 1967 he published a second volume of war-time diaries, Document, and, in 1969 another volume of poetry, Poročilo (Report). His collected poems, Zbrane pesmi, appeared in 1971, containing three new volumes of work, Pentagram, Embers, and Bride in Black.

Late in his life, Kocbek received the acclaim that had been previously denied him, and he was welcomed to literary circles in Slovenia and traveled to several countries, including England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy, becoming a particularly close friend with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll. Upon his death in 1981, he was granted a state funeral.

A newspaper reports:the Lippizaners collaboratedon a historical film.A radio explains:a millionaire had bought the Lippizaners,the noble animals were quietthroughout the journey over the Atlantic.And a text book teaches:The Lippizaners are graceful riding horses,Their origin is in the Karst, they are of supple hoof,conceited trot, intelligent nature,and obstinate fidelity.

But I have to add, my son,that it isn’t possible to fit theserestless animals into any set pattern:it is good, when the day shines,the Lippizaners are black foals.And it is good, when the night reigns,the Lippizaners are white mares,but the best is,when the day comes out of the night,then the Lippizaners are the white and black buffoons,the court fools of its Majesty,Slovenian history.

Others have worshipped holy cows and dragons,thousand-year-old turtles and winged lions,unicorns, double-headed eagles and phoenixes,but we’ve chosen the most beautiful animal,which proved to be excellent on battlefields, in circuses,harnessed to princesses and the Golden Monstrance,therefore the emperors of Vienna spokeFrench with skillful diplomats,Italian with charming actresses,Spanish with the infinite God,and German with uneducated servants:but with the horses they talked Slovene.

Remember, my child, how mysteriouslynature and history are bound together,and how different are the driving forces of the spiritof each of the world’s peoples.You know well that ours is the land of contests and races.You, thus, understand why the white horsesfrom Noah’s ark found a refuge on our pure ground,why they became our holy animal,why they entered into the legend of history,and why they bring the life pulse to our future.They incessantly search for our promised landand are becoming our spirit’s passionate saddle.

I endlessly sit on a black and white horse,my beloved son,like a Bedouin chiefI blend with my animal,I’ve been traveling on it all my life,I sleep on it, and I dream on it,and I’ll die on it.I learned all our prophesieson the mysterious animal,and this poem, too, I experiencedon its trembling back.

Nothing is darker thanclear speech,and nothing more true than a poemthe intellect cannot seize,heroes limp in the bright sun,and sages stammer in the dark,the buffoons, though, are changing into poets,the winged Pegasi run faster and fasterabove the caves of our old earthjumping and pounding—the impatient Slovenian animalsare still trying to awaken the legendary King Matjaz.

Those who don’t know how to ride a horse,should learn quicklyhow to tame the fiery animal,how to ride freely in a light saddle,how to catch the harmony of the trot,and above all to persist in the premonition,for our horses came galloping from far away,and they still have far to go:motors tend to break down,elephants each too much,our road is a long one,and it is too far to walk.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens was the second of five children of a lawyer father and a mother who had been a former schoolteacher. Stevens’ upbringing in this middle-class, Presbyterian, bible-reading family was quite conventional. He played football, was educated in the classics, and graduated in 1897, the same year as his brother.

Stevens attended Harvard University as a special student, allowing him a reduced tuition but no degree. While there he began writing fiction and poems for the local campus magazine, and in following years he was elected president of the Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine. While at Harvard, Stevens also encountered the noted philosopher-poet George Santayana, with whom he met several times and with whom he shared some of his poetry.

Leaving Harvard in 1900, Stevens was intent to become a writer. In New York he worked briefly for the New York Tribune and then as an editor at World’s Work. His father, however, strongly disapproved of his literary aspirations, and under his pressure, Stevens entered law school in New York in 1901, from which he graduated two years later. For the next thirteen years Stevens continued living in Manhattan, working in a legal capacity and regularly attending literary salons and readings that included figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp and the composer Edgard Varèse. His career seemed to go adrift, as he moved from one law firm to another and worked at four different insurance companies. However, he continued to write poetry, composing many of the works that would make up his 1923 volume, Harmonium.

In 1909, after a long courtship, he married Elsie Viola Kachel Moll, but the relationship was tempestuous at best. In later years, they lived separate lives in their Hartford, Connecticut home.

In 1916, Stevens found himself unemployed and was forced to leave New York to take a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company in Hartford. During these years, Stevens worked his way up in the company, gaining substantial financial success, but his interchange with contemporary authors shifted as he became more isolated and reclusive.Harmonium was not a financial success, but contained some of this most outstanding poems of any first publication by a poet. Among the works in this volume were the noted poems “The Snow Man,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

He did not publish his second volume, Ideas of Order, until twelve years later, in 1935. Over the remaining years of his life, Stevens published essays and poetry at regular intervals, and late in his life, won several prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in 1950, National Book Awards in 1951 and 1955, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. The same year as the Pulitzer, Stevens was diagnosed in incurable stomach cancer, and died August 2nd in Hartford.

Claude McKay was born in 1889 in the rural village of Nairne Castle, Jamaica when it was still a British Crown colony. The youngest of eleven children, he was the beneficiary of his father’s successful rise from a day laborer to a commercial farmer. His brother U. Theo, a noted schoolteacher who favored Fabian socialism and was a supporter of Aldous Huxley, and Walter Jekyll, An English-born scholar who compiled a collection of Jamaican folklore, saw to it that the young Claude received a free and liberal education. As a young man, McKay read a wide variety of literary figures from Villon, Baudelaire, Pope and Bryon to the Elizabethan lyricists, Goethe, Heine and Schopenhauer. Jekyll particularly encouraged his young student’s writing, and served as audience to his poetry. Through Jekyll’s support, a newspaper in Kingston declared McKay a Jamaican “genius,” and published several of McKay’s Creole-based poems. At the same time, McKay began to work as a constable outside Kingston, but feeling uncomfortable with the position, he quit the police force and returned to Clarendon in 1911, leaving, a year later along with numerous other black islanders to the United States.

McKay stayed for brief periods in Alabama (where he attended the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas before finally settling in Manhattan in Harlem. After his lunchroom business failed along with his marriage, he worked as a head waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car; in the meantime he continued his associations with the literary communities of both Harlem and Greenwich Village, exploring both sexual and political liberation, discovering his bisexuality at the same time he explored radical political involvement. By 1917, he had begun to be published in leftist journals such as Seven Arts and the Liberator, edited by Max Eastman, who became an ally and financial backer of McKay. In 1919 he sailed for England and the Continent for two years, returning to Harlem as an editor of the Liberator. In 1922 he published his only American poetry collection, Harlem Shadows.

A trip to Moscow in 1923 to observe the Bolsehvik revolution gained him a reputation as a Communist sympathizer and began the FBI investigations into his activities which would result in extensive reports of his writing and work, which encouraged him to leave the US in 1922, and he lived for twelve years in Europe and North Africa. Throughout this period and into the 1930s, McKay wrote fiction, including Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). His short stories, Gingertown, were collected in 1932. He also continued to write essays and journalist reports on African American history and culture, including Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) and, in Russian, Trial by Lynching: Stories about Negro Life in North America.

In 1934, having denounced Stalin’s Soviet Union, he returned to the US, writing poems that reflected his religious involvement with Catholicism. He died of heart disease on May 22nd, 1948.

An’ plant on it my fav’rite fern,Which I be’n usual wear;In days to come I shall returnTo end my wand’rin’s dere.

(from Songs of Jamaica, 1912)

J’Accuse

The world in silence nods, but my heart weeps:See, welling to its lidless blear eyes, pourForth heavily black drops of burning gore;Each drop rolls on the earth’s hard face, then leapsTo heaven and fronts the idle guard that keepsHis useless watch before the august door.My blood-tears, wrung in pain from my heart’s core,Accuse dumb heaven and curse a world that sleeps:For yester I saw my flesh and bloodDragged forth by pale-faced demons from his bedLashed, bruised and bleeding, to a piece of wood,Oil poured in torrents on his sinless head.The fierce flames drove me back from where I stood;There is no God, Earth sleeps, my heart is dead.

(1919/Complete Poems, 2004)

The White House

Your door is shut against my tightened face,And I am sharp as steel with discontent;But I possess the courage and the graceTo bear my anger proudly and unbent.The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,And passion rends my vitals as I pass,A chafing savage, down the decent street,Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,And fine in it the superhuman powerTo hold me to the letter of your law!Oh I must keep my heart inviolate,Against the poison of your deadly hate!

(1922/Complete Poems, 2004)

The Tropics in New York

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

My eyes great dim, and I could no more gaze;A wave of longing through my body swept,And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)

The Harlem Dancer

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutesAnd watcher her perfect, half-clothed body say;Her voice was like the sound of blended flutesBlown by black players upon a picnic day.She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,The light gauze hanging loose about her form;To me she seemed a proudly-swing palmGrown lovelier for passing through a storm.Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curlsluxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;But looking at her falsely-smiling face,I knew her self was not in that strange place.

(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)

The Lynching

His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.His father, by the cruelest way of pain,Had bidden him to his bosom once again;The awful sin remained still unforgiven.All night a bright and solitary star(Perchance the one that ever guided him,Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to viewThe ghastly body swaying in the sunThe women thronged to look, but never a oneShowed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;And little lads, lynchers that were to be,Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

Born in Glencoe, Illinois, Archibald MacLeish was the son of Andrew MacLeish, a dry-goods merchant, and his third wife, a college professor, Martha Hillard. The father was reserved, stern, and removed from his four children. The mother worked to develop in them a strong sense of social responsibility, which would come characterize MacLeish’s own life.

He spent his childhood on their estate on Lake Michigan, attending a private school, Hotchkiss, from 1907-1911 before attending Yale University in 1911, where he majored in English. At Yale, MacLeish wrote poetry and was involved in campus literary and social activities, as well as participating in college football. In 1915 he graduated from Yale, and entered Harvard Law School in the fall. The next year he married Ada Taylor Hitchcock, with whom he had four children, one of them dying in infancy.

Upon the U.S. entry in World War I, MacLeish enlisted as a private in Yale’s hospital unit, but soon shifted to a combat unit. At the same time Yale University Press published his first collection of poems, Tower of Ivory (1917).

MacLeish returned home from the war without his beloved younger brother, Kenneth, who had been killed in air combat. Upon completing his law degree, MacLeish taught government at Harvard briefly before joining the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall, and Stewart. He was successful as a lawyer, but found it confining since he gave him little opportunity to write. He 1923 he was offered a partnership, but MacLeish chose instead to quit the firm, his father promising to support him and his family.

Taking his family to Paris in order to live more cheaply, MacLeish remained there for five years, befriending the numerous émigré American writers already living there, including Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Cummings. In order to transform himself into a modern poet, MacLeish learned Italian and studied the history of English-language poetry. Over these years, he produced five books, including The Pot of Earth (1925), Nobodaddy (1926), Einstein (1926), and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). Several of the poems of this period— including “Memorial Rain,” “You, Andrew Marvell,” and “Ars Poetica”—would become his most famous works.

Returning to the United States in 1928, he and his family moved into a farm in Conway, Massachusetts. In New Found Land of 1930, MacLeish proclaimed his love of the United States, despite his attraction to Europe. Another long poem, Conquistador (1932), dealt with issues symbolizing the American experience. In 1933 he won a Pulitzer Prize for that work.

Soon after his return to the U.S., MacLeish began writing from Henry Luce’s magazine Fortune, contributing numerous pieces on the American and international scenes and defining his relationship between art and society. Rejecting the modernist alienation from society and emphasis on the individual, MacLeish saw the poet as inevitably involved in his society. During the later 1930s, as Americans and their culture suffered under the depression, MacLeish wrote a number of radio and stage plays that dealt with current issues, Panic (1935), The Fall of the City (1937), and Air Raid (1938) among them.

Despite his strong American sentiments, MacLeish also criticized American values, arguing that Americans had no clear vision of their national goals and potential, something which he felt poetry could offer. But he was also highly criticized for these views as well as being scorned by the modernists for attempting to write a “public” poetry. The left attacked him, accordingly, as an unconscious fascist and the right saw him as a communist sympathizer, coining the word “fellow traveler” in particular reference to him.

His rising liberalism brought him into the circle of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, and later he would write speeches for the president. In 1939 Roosevelt nominated him to become the librarian of Congress, an organization he would radical reorganize. He 1941 he also directed the information/propaganda agency, the Office of Facts and Figures, moving from there to become the assistant director of the Office of War Information from 1942-1943. These positions left him little time for poetry.

Upon Roosevelt’s death, MacLeish returned to private life, writing, in 1948, his first collection of poetry since the late 1930s, Actfive andOther Poems, a statement of his continued love his country but also his ultimate disillusionment with its actions. In 1949 Harvard offered him a position as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position he held until his retirement in 1962. During this period he continued to write, publishing Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1952), which won him his second Pulitzer Prize. His disgust with MacCarthyism resulted in the play The Trojan Horse, published the same year. In 1955, after a visit with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths hospital, MacLeish fought for Pound’s release, which was accomplished in 1958. That same year, he finished his Broadway play, J. B., a work based on the biblical tale of Job. The play won another Pulitzer Prize.

After his retirement from Harvard, he continued to be active in writing and journalism, writing another play Herkales in 1967. He died in Boston in 1982.

December 21, 2008

Born in Springfield, Illinois the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, Vachel Lindsay was the son of a Scottish doctor in prosperity, living across the street from the governor’s mansion. His mother was a fundamentalist Christian, given to mystical visions, which would influence much of the Christian-based poetry of her son.

Lindsay studied medicine for three years at Hiram College, but dropped out in 1900 to learn drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met the famed American artist Robert Henri, who encouraged him on the route of poetry.

For most of his early years, Lindsay lived in such deep poverty that he even attempted to sell his poems door-to-door for enough money to eat. Soon after he embarked on a “tramp” journey of the South, begging for food and lodging. Returning to his Springfield family home, he was determined to embark upon what he described as a “New Localism,” a poetry that would encourage each American locality to support their local talent. Later, with Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, Lindsay would achieve a kind noted localism in what critics described as the “Middle Western School,” which found its best expression in poetry written from 1915 to 1925.

Lindsay’s first major work was solicited by Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine; the poem he sent, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” made him famous, and led him to a career at performing this poem and other later ones, collected in The Congo and Other Poems of 1914. Just as the Beats, Cowboy poets and performance artists of today, Lindsay presented his poetry as a kind of vaudevillian performance, replete with choruses and musicians. Lindsay also wrote one of the first serious books of film in 1915, The Art of the Moving Picture.

During the 1920s, continuing to live in Springfield, Lindsay briefly courted the poet Sara Teasdale before marrying, in 1925, Elizabeth Connor. By the end of that decade, however, his popularity had seriously waned. At the same time, his epilepsy, which he had previously kept secret, grew more serious. In 1931 he killed himself by drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Today much of Lindsay’s poetry seems outrageously naive, the writing seeming at times to have more to do with popular lyrics and a circus-like atmosphere than with serious modernist achievements. However, Lindsay’s incorporation of music, particularly jazz, and his interest in African-American rhythms of speech and music, alongside his incorporation of a Whitman-like populism, has continued to make his work of interest to some readers and critics.

(To be sung to the tune of `The Blood of the Lamb' with indicated instrument)I (Bass drum beaten loudly)Booth led boldly with his big bass drum -- (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) The Saints smiled gravely and they said: "He's come." (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank, Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale -- Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail: -- Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, Unwashed legions with the ways of Death -- (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) (Banjos)Every slum had sent its half-a-score The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.) Every banner that the wide world flies Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes. Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang, Tranced, fanatical, they shrieked and sang: -- "Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" Hallelujah! It was queer to see Bull-necked convicts with that land make free. Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare, On, on upward thro' the golden air! (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) II (Bass drum slower and softer)Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod, Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God. Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief, Eagle countenance in sharp relief, Beard a-flying, air of high command Unabated in that holy land. (Sweet flute music)Jesus came from out the court-house door, Stretched his hands above the passing poor. Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there Round and round the mighty court-house square. Yet in an instant all that blear review Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world. (Bass drum louder)Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole! Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl! Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean, Rulers of empires and of forests green! (Grand chorus of all instruments. Tambourines to the foreground)The hosts were sandalled, and their wings were fire! (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) O, shout Salvation! It was good to see Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free. The banjos rattled and the tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens. (Reverently sung, no instruments)And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer He saw his Master thro' the flag-filled air. Christ came gently with a robe and crown For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down. He saw King Jesus. They were face to face, And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Poet, composer, essayist, performance artist, playwright and painter, Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922. His poetry began to be published in 1941. Since 1954 he has often employed chance operations and other nonintentional, as well as intentional techniques, when composing verbal, musical, theatrical, and multimedia performance works. Mac Low’s turn to nonintentional methods was inspired by Zen Buddhism (as taught by Dr. D. T. Suzuki), the I Ching, and John Cage and his music composed in the early 1950s by chance operations, some of which is indeterminate in its performance.

By the middle 1960s, Mac Low was well known for his readings, performances, and theater works. The Marrying Maiden, a play chance-operationally derived (1958-59) from the I Ching, was performed by The Living Theater in New York in 1960-1961; it was directed by Judith Malina, with décor by Julian Beck and music by John Cage. Mac Low’s Verdurous Sanguinaria (written in 1961 and published in 1967) premiered in 1961, produced by the composer La Monte Young in Yoko Ono’s New York loft. His Twin Plays was performed in 1963. Selections from The Pronouns, forty poems that are instructions for dancers, was written in 1964 and performed in 1965 by Meredith Monk and a group she organized.

In 1963, with the editor La Monte Young, Mac Low co-published the first edition of An Anthology, which through George Maciunas gave rise to Fluxus, of which Mac Low was the first literary editor. Mac Low published several books of poetry throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, including August Light Poems (1967), 22 Light Poems (1968), Stanzas for Iris Lezak (1972), 4 trains (1974), 21 Matched Asymmetries (1978), and Asymmetries 1-260 (1980).

The 1980s saw Mac Low working more often in intentional poetic forms, influenced, in part, by the “Language” poets, some of whom themselves claimed Mac Low’s poetry as an influence. Among the major works of this period are From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday (1982) and Bloomsday (1984). A large selection of his work also appeared in Representative Works: 1938-1985 (1986). Over the past decades Mac Low continued to publish important works including Twenties (1991), Pieces o’ Six (1992), and 42 Merzgedichte in Memorium Kurt Schwitters, which won the 1994 America Award for the best new book of American poetry. In 1999 Mac Low was awarded the Tanning Prize for Poetry.

The effects of painful desperation were imposing their influence, she felt, on every democracy.
She always felt worst for a crowd rightly punished for wrong reasons.

Could frugal Clementi have been beaming dispositive influences directly at others?
Had she, without a thought, imposed a negative influence on everyone near her?
Possibly, she supposed, someone of limited understanding had mistaken an ironic remark for a revelation.

Desperately, she noted, freedom competed with itself and murmured at opportunities imposed on it.
The dire effects of forced dependence were being repulsed by the desperate.
Indelicate competition in the midst of imposed democracy was imposing desperation.
Imposed democracy was imposing desperation.

Early on she’d recognized a great many sorts of pretended feeling.
Clementi had shamelessly declared compunction at the slaughter of fishes.
She wrongly supposed that no dependent would notice her myriad contradictions.
Wouldn’t that have influenced her freedom’s recognition?
She herself murmured at every opportunity imposed on her.

The tyranny of desperation was the crowning affectation imposed on her.
With delicate compliments she declared her objection to that desperation.
Was that when she declared imposed democracy a punishment?
She felt it a punishment greater than being found out
Clementi found that she’d been disposing noxious beams in all directions.
They directly revealed her own dependence and what she depended on!

How could she reply to what she revealed to herself?
All were insisting they were desperate for freedom.
But what seemed to be the effect of what they called democracy?
A myriad murmured desperately at every opportunity.
What could compete with that massive indelicacy?
Clementi had learned the effects of what was being called democracy.
She felt imposed upon from every direction.

Seven strophes of which the numbers of sentences in successive strophes follow the sequence of cardinal numbers 1 through 7. Diastic text selection utilizing a mix of sentences by Charles Hartshorne, Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as source text and the poem’s epigraph as seed text produced a non-grammatical text from which the author “took off” when composing the poem. Words were modified, added, deleted, etc., as needed. Everything was tampered with.

So just like Nikolay GumilyovWith aching feet, attention!His snowy compass set for the last course,Clutching the Iliad, hands outstretched,To put into perspective what will happenWhen the plummeting bullets accent his bodyAnd let the entire, eventual revelationTake its final path brooding on his brow.Then a profound silence will fall,Lighter than fresh snow on latter day drifts,Polite whispers in Russian and ancient Greek will waftFrom the broken down door, black as ink,Leathery, ponderous, punctuated: "Please, madam, ladies first,""I insist, madam, ladies first."

II. 2005

December. Piazza d'Autore, Fontana di Lingua.A meeting of men in marble. But bingeingHas beaten, besmirched their bodies, even the strongest,And in this transparent air, purposefully etched as well,One of them, away from the rest, emerges not a stepFrom the medium, being a bas-relief, incomplete at that,And with very human traits refined,Though even the missing parts mirror what is human.In his teeth he clenches a spout of wood (also made of marble),Blocking the rest lodged in his body, undefined by the author,While all that unseen water gurgles from his Adam's apple,'round the backs of his heels, spurting out of a crackWhich the chisel's tip, held in a well-tanned fist, incised on his brow.

III.

Inhabitants of 1995. Not very far from here,A siren of our age is heard,Then shots, wailing, unfathomable silence.And everything from the start again.The human season has begun.And even farther from us,An ancient forest, attentive and morose,Retains the power to close its heavy gates in time,This time forever.

IV. 1998

In the silence of a foreign house, at the foot of the hill,Burdened by the autumnal pathos of vineyards,Translator Lirim sits down to unfetter a marble language.It is a rare moment as thousands of eyes watch, as if on screen,The point of his pen which has finally piercedThe capillary path, so deathly grey,That ends at the heels.Yet the blinding light in which he squints and flinches comes notFrom the copper clasp of ancient sandals, butFrom the barrel pin of sniper No---, who from the hill crest,Hiding in houses nourishing fructose wisdom,Hastens at high noon to shoot a hole in the tip of the quillWhich in the blink of an eye unleashes that hexametrical magma.So nigh was language, but it was not to be written.

—Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

[Në dorë të autorit.]

The Skotini Cave

Excursion into the dark, this most primaeval of motherhoods.With our heads resting on those shadowy palms,We crept, delving into the body of the cave,But we did come back, we always came back.North winds on the waters in the womb of the deep,Sombre breezes blowing in the bowels of our beings.We were there to give birth to awe, and our brows - to script,The cave lent us her gravities,A bevy of bats fluttered by towards the light."Once, the speleologists poured untold litresOf fluorescein into the waters down there,Which resurfaced miles away,Where the Drino and Kardhiq rivers meetAt the Palokastra Cascade."Its essence distilled in a mist teeming with words,The fluorescein mapped the halves of our skulls.And then, a free return. Subpassages orSubmeanings of synapses swelled to their margins,With all of us there, and for one moment, we were language itself.

The daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930, and spent her childhood in France. Growing up speaking French, English and Italian, Rosselli was, from her childhood on, multilingual, which, turn, would highly influence the syntactical complexity of her poetry.

The second determining factor of her life, the fact that she experienced the murder of her father, the anti-Fascist martyr Carlo Rosselli, and her brother─both brutally killed, by order of Benito Mussolini and Galeazzo Ciano, at Bagnole-de-l'Orne, Normandy. This event, and its aftermath─during the war she and her mother traveled throughout Europe to escape the Nazis─would have a lasting effect on her mental health. Much of her life was spent in therapy, and in 1996 she leaped from her high-rise apartment to her death. Rosselli herself has described the death of her father leaving an emotional void, which she attempted to fill through her writing.

After the war, she and her mother returned to Italy, staying for a short while in Florence before moving by herself to England, where she studied music: violin, piano, and composition. The following year, her mother died in Florence, and Amelia was forced, at eighteen years of age, to find self-employment. She began as a translator for Comunità in Rome. And here, directed by her father's cousin, Alberto Pincherle (who wrote under the name of Alberto Moravia), she began reading Italian writers while continuing to study music in her spare time.

During these years, she also met the Italian poet Rocco Scotellaro at meeting of resistance partisans. They would remain close friends until his early death in 1953.

Influenced by writers such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Cesare Pavese, Sandro Penna, and Eugenio Montale, Rosselli began moving toward literature as a career. In the late 1950s she was already writing some of her earliest lyrics, some of which were to be included in her two major early books, Variazioni belliche (1964, War Variations, 2003) and Serie ospedaliera (1969, Hospital Series). These two early works her championed by Pasolini and others. Her third major collection, Documento, 1966-1973, published in 1976, followed by a hiatus from poetry for several years, until she published Impromptu (1981) and Appunti sparsi e persi (1983). Rosselli also composed experimental musical compositions of musica concreta.

Poems from War VariationsRoberto, mother calls out, playfully rocking on the whitedivan. I do not knowwhat God wants of me, seriousintentions rending eternity, or the frank laughterof the puppet hanging fromthe railing, railing yes, railing no, ohpostpone your heartfelt prayer witha moving babble; car the dry and yellow leaves ravishthe wind that stirs them. Black vision tree that tendstoward the supreme power (pasture which in fact Ithink bleaches instead the ground beneath my feet, you aremy lover if the sky darkens, and the shiveris yours, in the eternal forest. Empty city, full city, citythat soothes the fantastic forthe most part pain of the senses, you sitsweltering after the meal you made of me, toy of leveling windfrom the coast I no longer dareto face, I fear the red waveof actually living, and the plants that say goodbye. Tom-boy I straddle your bridges, and make them maybemy ownnature.I no longer knowwho comes and who goes, letdelirium transform you into a senselessgaming table, and the wild broom (room) faces outspreading your sun across the reflecting glass.

*

I was, I flew, I fell trembling into thearms of God, and may this last sighbe my whole being, and may the wave reward,held in difficult union, my blood,and from that supreme deceit may deathbecome vermillion be given back to me, and Iwho from the passionate brawls of my comrades pluckedthat longing for deathwill enjoy, finally─the age of reason;and my all the white flowers along the shore, andall the weight of Godbeat upon my prisons.

*

What is it with my heart that beats so softlyand esperate makes, makeththe hardest soundings? you Thosetutories that I imprinted on afore hetormented himself sofiercely, and are vanished for him! O if myerabbits coursing throughthe nervies he forfrosty canals of my lymph (o life)they don't stop, then yes, tha' I, meyetsaclose to they dead! In all sinceauity my soulmay you remedy it, I ambrace you, you,─may you find der Softe Worde, may you returnto the fathomed tongue that allows love to stay.

*

tomorrow's claws, ignite in deafwhirpools the lympth of your growth; don'tgothere; don't play withyour strength in the hell of wind andhail today obliges your majesty to bow! Ifyou believe in the grammar of the poor, listen then tothe growing envy of the rich,─you will soon get used tobeing born one of them.

*

And who can guarantee you are not one of thosewho die on the shovel instead─who can warnme of your spider web. Too late Icalled the flies to shelter.

*

and what did that crowd want from my senses other thanmy scorched defeat, or I who beggedto play with the gods and stumbledlike a poor whore up and downthe dark corridor─oh! wash my feet, takethe fierce accusations from mybent head, bendyour accusations and undo allmy cowardice!: it wasn't my wish to break the delicate layer of icenot my wish to break the mounting battle, no, I swear, it wasn't mywish to break through your laughablelaughter!─but the hail has other reasons thanserving and the wet eastern wind ofevening does not dream of standingwatch by mydisenchanged lion sobs: no longer will I runafter every passage of beauty,─beauty is defeated, never againat attention will I snuff out that fire now glimmering likean old tree trunkin which hollow swallows make nonsensical nests, child's lay,unreckoning misery, unreckoning misery of sympthy.

*

That violent rustling of birds, their flirtatiousrising in swarms from the hardest trees(the tender lion roars in a flight of thoughtand my faith lights up) their perching on the thinnest topstheir distracted gazing into the distance, thisis your desire, flying over my mountains of anxiousnessthis is your warm thread of unknowinganxiousness.

*

Inside of grace the number of my friends increasedand joy wove stories of impossible loves. Inside ofgrace the poor tormented the rich and the hat was liftedin an act of pure gratitude. Inside the Tao boredom vanishedoutside of grace the murdered poet rhymed. Inside ofgrace the passing bird dirtied the furnitureyesterday the day before yesterday there was a compass, todaythe rain sadly pours and the promises of the rich area light that does not add up. Close to grace laylove inside of grace every flower looked bad and at dawnhell dirtied very light. Outside fury a hurricanesinisterly scoured the main avenue of all ourfrenzies. Such is the birth─such is the revenge ofthe poor in spirit. Against the spirit of mercyarose unanimous my salacious heart that came down touchedby grace but was unable to find the daytime sun exceptin a cry of business. To find Chaos again a clarinet'snote was enough. (Indifference itself.)

*

We count endless dead! the dance is almost over! death,the explosion, the swallow lying wounded on the ground, disease,and hardship, poverty and the devil are my cases ofdynamite. Late I arrived to pity─late I lay amongbills in the pocket troubled by a peace that was not offered.Near death the ground returned to the collectors the priceof glory. Late he lay on the ground that returned his bloodsoaked with tears peace. Christ sitting on the ground onreclined legs also lay in blood when Mary laboredwith him.

Born in Paris labored in the epos of our flowedgeneration. Lay in America among the rich fields of landlordsand of the stately State. Live in Italy, barbaric country.Fled from England, country of sophisticates. Hopefulin the West where for now nothing grows.

The bamboo-café was the night.

The congenitals' tendency to goodness awakening.

*

The hell of light was love. The hell of lovewas sex. the world's hell was the oblivion of thesimple rules of life: stamped paper and a simpleprotocol. Four beds face down on the bed fourfriends dead with a gun in their hand four keyson the piano that give back hope.

─Translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti

(from Variazioni belliche, 1964)

from Serie Ospedaliera

I sell you my cooking stove, then you scratch itand sit unprepared on the deskif I sell you the light yoke ofmy diseased mind, the less stuff I have, thehappier I am. Undone by the rainand by sorrows immeasurable menstruationsenility approaching, petroleumimagination.

*

Search for an answer to an unconscious voiceor believing, through it one's found it─I saw the musesdazzled, spreading empty veils on their handsnot correcting themselves at the portal. Searching foran answer to reveal, the oriastic meaning of eventsthe particular obfuscation of a fatethat through brief rips of light opposes─the only sensethis prestigious act: that does not forget, letsthe walls graze the skin, suffers no estrangementsand does no revolt, against this shatteringand sobbing hurt, that is my moon on the facethe smell of angels on the arms, the step firmand not concealed: the ruin slow by complete:a non-detachment from low things, writing of themsupine.─Translated from the Italian by Lucia Re andPaul Vangelisti(from Serie Ospedaliera, 1969)

from Documento (1966-1973)The angels exitwhite and blueand I sit at the balconyblack and white

Crisis of bovarysmcrisis of impoverishment!crisis of flowerscrisis of workers

Dialogue is done in fourlike a diagonal lineI describe busesI start up againmore prayerswhy are the trees blue?

(Things themselvessow my heart with light)

*

As if I knew what the opposite meansthings quite remote in the small homelandoutside the forest, and from the tropical heapsin the beige of the tricolormorgana with uncorrupted wingsin the poverty turned by now into a horrid kennelvictim that perpetuates her painas if truth were reborn from this clashwith the putrid air of these lost facesin the unromantic hour of the very late morningwhat if now you saidwhat is not conveniently saidin poetry?